A daily note that's already there when you open the app.

Open Remlo and today’s page is already there. The cursor sits at the top of it, waiting.

That is the entire feature. If you have been looking for a daily notes app on iPhone that does not ask you to make one first, this is the behaviour you were looking for.

The daily page is the capture layer

I built Remlo around the daily page because I kept losing thoughts in the two seconds it took to decide where they went.

Every notes app I used asked a question before it let me write. Which notebook. Which folder. Which project. Reasonable questions, all of them, and all of them arriving at exactly the wrong moment. The thought I wanted to keep was three words long and it did not survive the trip through a file picker.

So Remlo removes the question. There is a page for today. It exists whether or not you use it. Writing starts at the first keystroke.

Structure comes afterwards, when you actually know what the thing is. You link the line to a project page, or a person, or a note you wrote in March. The daily page keeps the record of when you thought it; the link decides where it belongs. That order matches how the thinking actually happens.

What actually goes on a daily page

The word journal puts people off, because it suggests an evening and a paragraph about your feelings. A daily page in practice is more mundane than that.

A line from a call: the number they said, the name of the person who has to approve it. A to-do typed mid sentence, because it arrived mid sentence. The title of a book someone recommended. A question you want to come back to. Three words about why the build failed. The reason you changed your mind about something you were sure of last week.

Almost none of that deserves its own note, which is why it goes missing in apps that want one. A note called “Untitled” is a note nobody named because it was not worth naming, and it dies unnamed. On a dated page the same line costs nothing to keep and stays locatable by roughly when it happened, which is how memory indexes things anyway.

Some days the page holds one line. Some days forty. Nothing has to be filled in, so there is no streak to break and no empty template staring at you.

What a daily page collects on its own

Old daily pages do not rot the way an untitled note does. A note called “Untitled 47” is dead the moment you close it. A page dated 12 March is findable forever, because you remember roughly when things happened even when you cannot remember what you called them.

Three things accumulate on the day without you filing them.

Every to-do you type inline on the page is collected on the To-dos page. You write “buy the flight” in the middle of a paragraph about a trip and it lands on the list with the others. Tick it in either place and it moves to Done on the board.

Every habit you tick logs against that day, next to the page where the day was written. The momentum chart reads from those ticks.

Every link you make points both ways, so the project page fills up with the days that mentioned it.

Six months of this leaves you with something that looks like a record and cost nothing to keep.

What a daily notes app usually costs to set up

Obsidian ships daily notes as a core plugin. You enable it, pick a folder for the files, pick a date format, and most people then install Periodic Notes and write a template so the page opens with the headings they want. Then there is the sync decision, because sync is a paid add on or an arrangement you build yourself. It is a good system and it is entirely yours, which is exactly why it takes an evening.

Logseq is closer out of the box. It opens on a journal page by default and that page is dated for you. The cost there is different: it was built desktop first, and the phone came afterwards, which tends to show in the places you use most on a phone.

Remlo has no daily notes setting because there is nothing to configure. No vault, no plugins, no template, no folder to choose. The page is dated, it is already open, and it syncs through the iCloud account you have had for years.

Written for the phone first

Remlo is a native app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It opens in the time it takes to unlock the screen, it writes with no signal, and it uses Apple Pencil on iPad in the same pages that link and sync.

That matters more for daily notes than for any other kind. A project page gets opened at a desk, deliberately, with time. A daily page gets opened while walking, in a lift, in the ninety seconds before a meeting starts. It competes with the Notes app that is already on the home screen and opens in one tap, and if it loses that comparison it does not get used, however good the linking is.

Your notes sync through your iCloud account, so the day you started on the phone is open on the Mac when you sit down. No sync service to choose, no account to create, nothing to configure before the first sentence.

Related: every to-do you write inline lands on one page, and links point both ways so the project page collects the days that mentioned it.

The test for a daily page is whether you reach for it while standing up. Every extra second before the cursor appears is a thought you will not write down.